Materials, Sliders and Shaders

Making A New Material

To create a new material, right click in your project window, go to Create and choose Material. This will make a default gray material in your project window.
You can then drag this material onto the clothing item in the scene.

You can change the colour of this material here:

Metallic Slider

Using the metallic slider will let the Albedo colour control the colour of the specular reflection and most liight will be reflected as specular reflections.
In more simplier terms, if you want to create something metallic, you would want to have the metallic slider high and also the smoothness slider high so that the material will reflect light like a metal does.

Smoothness Slider

The smoothness slider will reduce the amount of shine and hardness from the clothing.
For the t-shirt I made, I have set the smoothness slider to the lowest and also the metallic slider to the lowest so there is no reflective light or specular light coming from the material.
You can play around with these sliders until you get the outcome you want.

Normal Map

If you have made a high poly version of your clothing item, then you can make the normal map for it in your 3D software and apply it to your low poly item.

You can add normal map images by dragging and dropping your normal map image from where you saved it into your project window, then dragging it into the normal map slot.

Note: Make the normal map image a normal map texture first by clicking on the image and choosing normal map under the texture type in the import settings on the right hand side of the screen.

Height Map

Height maps are usually used alongside normal maps, and they are used to give definition to surfaces where the texture maps are responsible for rendering bumps and protrusions.

Add the height map the same way as a normal map, but drag the image into the Height Map slot.

Occlusion Map

Occlusion maps are used to provide information for which areas on the clothing item will receive direct or indirect lighting. For example, if you make a metal buckle for a belt, you can add in an occlusion map to create shiner parts of the belt and parts that are darker.

Add the Occlusion Map the same way as a normal map, but drag the image into the Occlusion slot.

Emission

Emission controls the colour and intensity of light on your clothing item. If you set the emission to black, there will be no parts of the clothing that look lighter. If you want to make parts look lighter, you can set the emission to gray (for making parts slightly lighter) or white (for making parts look a lot lighter)

I recommend not setting the emission to anything other than black for clothing that would be made from material like cotton, denim or brick, but it can be set for items made out of leather, PVC or metal.

Detail Maps

Secondary Maps (or Detail maps) allow you to overlay a second set of textures on top of the main textures. You can apply a second Albedo colour map, and a second Normal map.
These would be mapped on a much smaller scale and repeated many times across the object’s surface, compared with the main maps.
The reason for this is to allow the material to have sharp detail when viewed up close, while also having a normal level of detail when viewed from further away.
These detail maps are usually used for creating small details like tiny hairs on the skin, pores on the skin, or things like really small cracks in walls and floors.

Fresnel Effect

One important visual cue of objects in the real world has to do with how they become more reflective at grazing angles.
This is called the Fresnel effect.
In the Standard shader there is no direct control over the Fresnel effect.
Instead it is indirectly controlled through the smoothness of the material.
Smooth surfaces will present a stronger Fresnel, totally rough surfaces will have no Fresnel.

You want to set the smoothness higher for materials like reflective glass, leather, PVC, metals, anything in the real world that would have a hardness and reflectiveness to it.